WWDC 2025 + iOS 19, Apple’s Siri Shakeup, OpenAI Raising $40B, and THAT Signal Group Chat
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See you at the equator.

Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Lots of news this week. Apple announced dates for WWDC. iOS 18.4 should be coming out next week to the public. Plus, ChatGPT 4.0 now generates even better imagery. Tested that out. OpenAI is about to close a huge funding round. The Meta Tell-All book. And Jason has the Sigma BF camera in hand. We're going to discuss that as well. This episode is exclusively brought to you by you, the members who support us directly. So thank you for that.

I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, and joining me with a BF camera and the wrong opinion about the Severance finale, my friend Jason Aiton. How's it going, Jason? Good. I mean, the camera's great. We'll talk about that later. We'll talk about the camera later, yeah. And we can't review the Severance finale. We don't have time for that. But I just know that through our text, I think you have the wrong opinion. I'm just... Yeah, well, I have a strong, strong opinion about one particular aspect of it, which is like the ending of the ending. Yeah.

The only part that matters, right? It was good. It was a good finale. It was compelling until they literally took the wrong turn down the wrong way. Well, see that, but okay. No, we're not getting into it. You're not baiting me into this. We'll have to have another podcast, maybe with our friend Nate. We'll talk about that. But there is some other severance news and things on Apple's website that we'll get to that in a second. But we have a bunch of more five-star reviews. Thank you for keep trying to getting us back to a five-star show in Apple Podcasts. I didn't check today.

If we made it back up to a five-star podcast. I did check today and we are so close guys. We're 4.9. If you can believe it, we've been 4.9 for three weeks, but yeah, I don't know how many more we need, but thank you for rating the show across the world. We have Mitch Kuhn from Tampa, which is amazing. He's the right off the road from me. Apple pencil tip towards the volume buttons, battery percentage off dots on and

He knows what's up. He knows what's up. Scott K. Podcaster from Canada. Dave from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This is oldest tech is a Commodore Amiga three and a quarter floppy disk based solar calculator. I don't even know what all that is, but it sounds like a lot of words. It's a lot of words, but it sounds old. Deepak N112 from the USA. Jonah Sachs from the USA. Better percentage on tip up mixture there. We both won that one.

Hokkaido North country from Japan. We have listeners all the way in Japan, Jason. That's amazing. Awesome. Do you translate for that for people?

No, no, I don't. Actually, there's actually a Riverside feature that you can now translate, but I won't get into that. But I think his review, I think, was translated. So I'm not sure how that goes. But thank you for that. It's amazing. RSG 526 from the USA, Rainbow Dash 13 from the USA, and Time Pilot 84 from the USA. Thank you for those five-star reviews. Keep them coming. One day we'll reach five-star rating again in Apple Podcasts. But speaking of severance, I want to get back to this behind-the-scenes video that

that Apple released earlier this week, which is an amazing video. You should watch it. It's just about 11 minutes long, and Apple, it's behind the scenes talking about the editing. Ben Stiller's in it. He's talking with the people who edit it. I guess there was like three editors and some assistant editors, but they talk about what they actually use to edit, which is Avid, I believe, the software. Avid Media Composer is what they use to edit it, but the hardware they use to edit it, Apple puts at the very end,

The severance is edited on an iMac, Mac mini and MacBook pro no Mac studio, no Mac pro. Well, there was a Mac studio in one of the shots though. I feel like, uh, there might've been, but at the very end, you know, was that a Mac mini? Was that the one you just showed was a Mac mini? It was a Mac mini. And then at the very end, it says severance is edited on Mac mini, iMac and MacBook pro.

That's it. And there's this one shot in the marching band scene, which if you haven't seen the finale, no spoilers, but in the marching band scene, the editor was talking about how they had so many cameras capturing so many angles and there was nine bins of nine angles to choose from at times, which would be

My multiplication is 81. It's 81. Yeah. I was about to say 81. And again, Mac mini high Mac or MacBook pro. And I'm over here wondering, do I need an M three ultra or an M four max max studio? Yeah.

i don't think i do i don't think i do jason so i think i think the answer is you definitely need a mac pro when it comes out mac pro m4 extreme well and the thing that was funny was he made a comment sort of there was several throwaway lines and now it was like 90 minutes long it was fantastic it was better than the finale don't say no don't don't stop doing that no baiting okay but he said uh

he did he goes he first of all he's like there's nine banks of nine and camera shots we can look at so i'm doing the math in my head he's like they're not all running at the same time okay great that's fine right but then he's like we remote into the mac mini where all the footage is and i'm just they were so yeah because the editors were not in the same place all the time they said they remoted into a mac mini which a i want to know what software they're using to remote in if they're just like vn singing i imagine there's some security there also like they were editing and just like

people's living rooms like they were did not look like a studio or anything like they were just chilling out in a house but i feel really good about this m4 pro mac mini sitting on my desk i do it's like we can podcast with 81 people steven right now 81 people i also want to say from our community social.primarytech.fm paul meyer says he went to a community severance a pally fest session where they played the finale with 3 000 people watching said it

Said it was an amazing experience. Plus, they had a panel with some of the actors afterwards. So I'm sure that was a very cool experience. And also, whoever is doing marketing for Severance specifically at Apple needs multiple raises because not only did they do the Grand Central Terminal thing, not only have they done amazing on social media. Look what's on Apple's website right now.

The Lumen Terminal. It's not that it's just on its website. It's one of the tabs of products you can buy. You can't actually buy it, but it's right up there next to the MacBook Air. What? Like, who convinced them to do this? Again, whoever is in charge of this marketing for Severance, incredible. Amazing. This is hilarious. So anyway, whoever it is, good on you. Also reach out. You can come on the show as a guest. We'd love to talk to you. That'd be amazing. I mean, you never saw a tab that said AFC Richmond up there.

Well, I don't know what, I mean, it's not really a... Jerseys, man. Jerseys. Yeah, but Apple doesn't sell other merch like shirts. You know what I mean? They also don't sell the Lumen Terminal Pro. Just be clear. Fair enough. Fair enough. Anyway, it's amazing that they're doing all that. And the finale was incredible too. Don't let Jason tell you otherwise. Other Apple news. Dub dub. Dub dub was announced. WWDC.

is scheduled for June 9th and it's going to be big developer conference, iOS 19, all the updates, June 9th through 13th. So media invites, uh, those aren't out yet. And so I'm, I'm crossing my fingers. We will see. We'll see how it goes. Apparently if you are a developer, you can apply and maybe win like a lotto to be there on for June 9th, where you'll be like, you can go to the keynote basically and,

And so I was about to do that, and then I realized my developer account had lapsed. Like, I have not paid for it. And so I didn't do that, and I didn't renew it. So crossing fingers for Media Invite. We'll see. But yeah, there's some rumors about the iOS 19 redesign and how it's supposed to be a bunch of stuff. But June 9th, it's happening. Right there at Apple Park. Apple Park. Apple Park. So then this news, related, happened...

right after we basically publish an episode i don't know why this keeps happening this is what happens on thursdays we've actually been strongly considering waiting until 9 30 at night to record this show because everything comes out but yeah i thought thursdays is late enough in the week usually you know sometimes apple releases the bad news late on a friday but there's just been so much news now like on late thursday afternoons mostly because mark german leaks it or whatever but

After all the Apple intelligence and Siri delays that we had talked about in last week's episode, John Gruber's article about something rotten in Cupertino. Apparently, Gurman scooped this before any kind of official anything, which Apple hasn't made any official announcement, right? Or did they? I believe they made an internal announcement after this leaked. I don't know if they've actually made an official announcement. Right, exactly. So what happened was, apparently...

Mike Rockwell, who was in charge of Apple Vision Pro, is now going to be moved to take over Siri and the Apple intelligence features that have been delayed and since we don't know when they're going to come out. And Mike Rockwell will report directly to Craig Vittorigi, who's over software VP.

And John G. Andrea, who was actually like on stage on John Gruber's talk show after Dub Dub last year, talking about Apple intelligence and all that. John G. Andrea is going to be moved out of the Syrian Apple intelligence team. I forget. Did they say where he might be going? Well, I think he's still the head of their machine, like AI and machine learning. He's just not going to have the Siri part of it. Gotcha. So image playgrounds.

Genmoji, whatever else there might be like writing tools, writing tools. Like, no, but really I think, and maybe, you know, the first thing I think like when he came in, there was like talk that, okay, well Apple's building a search engine, right. For Siri or whatever. But I don't, you know, cause he spent a lot of time at Google. Like he's obviously a very serious person. It's just, it seems like Siri got kind of caught in the middle between this AI stuff and the software stuff. And obviously it has not worked out at all.

Right. So it's a big move. I think one of the other notable changes is John D'Andrea. John D'Andrea. Correct me if I'm wrong. G.N. Andrea. G.N. Andrea. He had reported directly to Tim Cook in the role he was overseer. Isn't that correct?

Well, again, his role is like head of artificial intelligence and machine learning and stuff. Right. But now that Mike Rockwell is coming from Apple Vision Pro over onto the voice assistant team, he's going to be reporting to Craig Federighi, which it seems like Tim Cook and leadership at Apple wants whoever is over that voice assistant team and the failures basically that have arisen. They want Craig Federighi to be in charge of that. So I think it's an interesting...

change and yeah i just sent you a picture from i justine's interview because john gianandrea was one of the people who was on stage with tim cook and craig frederici talking about um this was at wwdc but this particular interview was in the steve jobs theater um like shortly after the keynote and it was mostly just talking about you know the

The developments and what was going on. It was actually a very weird interview. We won't get into that, but that's John Gianandrea in the middle there. Right. I imagine he won't be on stage on any events this year at WWE. You know, that's tough because again, as far, even Gurman's reporting, like he's, he didn't get fired and he didn't get like moved off of the machine learning, uh,

the Apple intelligence like stuff. It is specifically the product of Siri is moving over with Mike Rockwell. And again, Mike Rockwell's chops is not like software development necessarily. He's like a deliver guy. He's, you know, he's, he's the guy that will get this thing out across the finish line. Like when it comes to the vision pro, uh,

he didn't design the vision pro right i think johnny i've designed the vision pro i mean it certainly looks like johnny i've designed the vision pro but mike rockwell's job was keep all of the parts moving that need to be you know like going forward so that this thing actually ships now whether it should have shipped or not we can argue about that but i don't know that that was a decision that mike rockwell made or maybe it was it's like we have to ship this thing because we can't ship the next version of this thing until we ship this thing so right

So we'll see. We'll see what happens. I'm curious, the Apple intelligence story at dub dub this year, because obviously that was a huge portion of it last year. That's when it was introduced and they showed off everything. I wonder if they will reiterate the semantic index and personalized Siri features again, or if it's just going to be like a mom about that. What do you think? I think, do you think they'll talk about it directly here? I don't know. I mean, I had an entire briefing on the semantic index and,

Wow. Like seriously. And the private cloud compute, like there was a whole briefing just on that aspect of it. And that is, I think they, I think that they have to keep talking about that, even if it's far off. Now, I hope that they learned that maybe they shouldn't try demoing it. If it's not something that's going to be shipping anytime soon. But in your briefing, there was no demo, right? Of the semantic index. No, there was definitely not a demo, but to be fair at that point,

What that briefing was about is like, here's how the technology of this works, right? We are creating an index of all of these different things so that you know that there's this, you have this photograph over here of a, you're in a coffee shop. So it's tagged as coffee. And then you have like this email with your coffee order. So it's like tagged as coffee. And so when you ask Siri a question about coffee, it automatically pulls all those things together and figures out which one of these things is relevant to your question. So, right, right.

Well, yeah, I'm curious. Obviously, Apple Intelligence, I guess they'll talk about because there are still features out there and you have visual intelligence and, you know, maybe they'll add stuff to that. But I'm curious what they'll talk about Siri specifically. We'll see. We'll see. I'm sure Mark Herman will have some kind of leak before WW2. That's probably true. iOS 18.4 is coming next week and there's some feature changes I'm going to list in a second. But Apple had a whole Newsroom article talking about update coming to AirPods Max.

the USB-C version specifically, which is going to bring lossless audio and ultra-low latency. Along with this announcement, they now started selling a $40 USB-C to 1⁄8-inch headphone jack, which you can now get as well. But supposedly this update is going to unlock 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio. And what I'm curious about, like when I edit video,

A lot of times I just use the built-in speakers on my studio display because using AirPods or any kind of headphones, there's either latency or weirdness when you like just try to play something in Final Cut. But they're saying there's ultra low latency audio with this update to AirPods Max. Curious how that's going to be. I never got the USB-C versions of these because...

the chip is the same. Like the inter... Aside from the USB-C port, it's literally the same headphones. It's still using the H1 chip instead of the H2. And so these lossless features...

It's interesting that they're just coming to the USB-C version because, again, same chip as the first version. I don't know why Lightning couldn't, but anyway. Well, I imagine it has something to do with the digital audio converter that's associated with the USB-C port. Right. I'm sure that that's got to be part of it. And also, I don't know. I imagine that that cable probably has some kind of controller in it to handle that as opposed to just...

Right. Because you have to be able to tell it I'm sending data versus sending power. And maybe it's just the lightning version. Either A, it just wasn't worth it because we're no longer selling this product. Right. Or B, but I think also... But like the ultra low latency, that's specifically for wireless, which it's the same. I mean, and that's true for gamers. That's the important thing. I mean, I don't know. Well, no, but I mean, it is weird. So first of all, there's no new hardware here. This is just a software update coming to...

The ones that already exist or a firmware update. I'm not exactly clear on how that's working, but this is, it is such an interesting thing that,

This is a feature that almost no one will be able to take advantage of. No. Yeah, no. We'll see. And the people who can did not buy AirPods Max. Correct. Correct. I actually posted this on social media. I actually got a pair of Sony XM5s recently because they were on sale on Amazon. And I was like, I want to see what all the hype is about. I've never tried a Sony over-the-ear headphones. I didn't have XM3s or 4s or anything. So trying it. I do like it.

There's definitely a difference in build quality, which being plastic, they're lighter than the AirPods Max. And I think a little more comfortable, especially over long periods. But I'll do a full, I'll do a full video. But you're the XM...

fours no i have xm4s and fives i just made the comment that i mean the xm5s are improved in a couple ways except for that they made the case bigger right so the xm4s are actually the ideal travel headphones because the case is very small i my favorite are my bowers and wilkins but even that case is a little bit bigger than those those sonys but yeah the people who are buying who care about lossless audio are buying like

you know, Hi-Fi Man or Folklandopia or stuff like that. They're not buying, you know, AirPods Max. No, no, they're not. They're not. So iOS 18.4, the release candidate is out right now.

Public version should be coming out next week. I'll have a video on it. Stay tuned for that. But there are some updates, big-ish features. Visual Intelligence will be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro. So if you didn't upgrade to the 16 but you want to try it, you'll be able to map it to the Action button and use a Control Center shortcut if you want to be able to access it that way. Ambient Music gets added into the Control Center. Quick access for that. The Mail Categories comes to iPad and Mac.

And there's a bunch of other things like Apple Podcasts app gets new widgets. Prioritize notifications is a new feature where you can actually say what apps you want to prioritize notifications from on the lock screen. New emojis, Apple News plus food and those recipes, which we've talked about on previous episodes. And the Apple Vision Pro app where you can actually easier guest mode starting that from your iPhone. And also you can like send media, like basically add video or whatever.

different things to your Apple Vision Pro from your iPhone. You don't have to put the Vision Pro on just to like add something to your up next.

So that's cool. Do you use the mail? Well, you use Spark, right? You don't really use Apple Mail. I use Spark. I only use Apple Mail. This was funny because I had to use it this week for you, Stephen. For me. Because I switched my personal email, not my personal, let's call it my workish email from Outlook to Gmail. And you cannot import an archive of emails into Gmail. No.

It's just like not possible. You cannot put them up on Gmail server to have them indexed. So they all live in actually, I moved them all to iCloud and,

And they are synced all into my in the mail app. I have one archive folder of basically every single email back to like 2003 or something like that. Yeah, it's amazing. And so I want you would ask me a question about WWDC. And I knew which email address it came to. But since that email address is no longer Outlook, it's I couldn't search in that. So I pulled up in the mail app. So really, all I ever use it for is cold storage. That mail app. That is fascinating. Okay.

I actually use the default mail app everywhere. I like it, except for that the snooze feature is not really a snooze feature. Which is one of the reasons I don't use it, because it's so good in Spark. Spark is great. It is one of the reasons I use SaneBox, because I basically have snooze features that way. But anyway...

I don't use the categories anywhere. I don't like the categories in mail. No. I don't. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. My wife almost made me buy her a new phone when the update happened and that happened to her thing. She just was so repulsed by the idea that suddenly her inbox looks so different. She's like, I can, I can have my old phone back. Can I please like get rid of it? I'm like, actually I could just turn off the feature. Yeah, just turn it off. Thank goodness. But if it ever comes back, I'm getting a new phone. Calling it. I'm calling it.

All right, so that's the Apple news. We might get to some of the rumors later if we have time, but OpenAI and ChatGPT has some news. They released better image creation using ChatGPT 4.0 model. And so if you were on X or some of the other social media platforms, there was thousands of Studio Ghibli. Is it Ghibli or Ghibli? I think it's Ghibli, but I don't know. I'm not a... Yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize to everyone for mispronouncing it. However, I mispronounced it.

But there were a bunch of anime-esque imagery that people were creating with the Chachapati 4.0 images. So there was that, and there's also some funding news. But I did want to show you, I generated an image of myself here. I gave it a picture of myself to make into anime. And so you can judge, Jason, whether or not this is good. This will be the chapter I work to, so you can see. So here's the picture I gave it, right? See that? And here's the anime version. Okay. Okay.

Not bad. I feel like... I mean, I don't watch enough anime to tell if that is what anime should look like, but it's what I imagine you would look like in one of those cartoons. Yeah, I feel like the picture I gave it, it did pretty good. So anyway, people were doing this with all kinds of stuff. If you were a character in a Pokemon movie, that's what you would look like. Yeah, I'm down for that. I'm down for that. Now wait, I thought... Didn't...

So do you pay for chat GPT? Chat GPT plus. Yeah, you do pay for it. Okay. Cause I was like, I didn't think you did. And I, I just remembered that they're saying it was, which is not surprising because of how overrun X was by these images. Sam Altman posted like, Hey, you know, this was a little more popular than we expected, which by the way is literally their playbook hype, a new thing.

grossly underestimate how popular it will be and then have to like throttle it back for people. Like you Jack, actually you're just faking us out every time. You're just doing the same thing. You know exactly what's going to happen. You just want to keep running that same play over and over again. So I did, but I didn't, it's like, they're not going to roll it out to the free tier for a while. Right. Yeah. For a while. But it is, it is pretty cool. People were doing like famous events and making them anime, which was interesting. But anyway, the other news is they're about to close another huge funding round.

Is this like a record-breaking round or their record or all funding? This would be the largest round ever because their previous round, which was something six point something, was the largest funding round at the time. And that was like six or seven billion dollars. And this is obviously more. Forty billion dollars is obviously a lot more. And it will value the company at 300 billion dollars, which is just bananas. But they need that 40 billion dollars because, you know...

Nvidia GPUs, they're just not getting any cheaper. What's wild though, they are still not profitable, correct? Well, right. If you have to raise $40 billion to pay for stuff, it's because you aren't making that money from customers. But like seriously, that $40 billion is not because they're going to hire a bunch of engineers. It's not because they're looking for software coders. It is to pay for electricity and for GPUs. Like literally that's what the money's for. Here's what I will say though.

Chachapiti. It's a pretty great product.

And I was thinking, like I did a video recently about the 35 apps I install on a new Mac when I start over from scratch. And I realized like ChatGPT is pretty key and I do use it all the time. And one of the things I did a video for Riverside recently, and it was like, you know, the 10 learnings from diary of a CEO podcast or whatever. And I was, you know, I was like, okay, this might take a while. I have to watch a bunch of videos. And then I was like, now, wait a minute.

I could probably do this another way. Another way. So I basically found a bunch of videos that talked about the strategies the podcast uses to grow. Downloaded those videos. I made them into MP3s. I transcribed them all.

I gave it all those transcriptions to ChatGPT and basically said like, what are 10 things that you could learn from this and phrase it like with some supporting material or whatever. And I was like, it blew my mind that something that would have been an all day process of like, you know, pulling this, finding where these clips are, what is useful, what's duplicate,

like judge he did it in a few minutes and i was like this is pretty great it is amazing i mean we're going to talk about something in a minute that i was writing about and i had i had a question that i knew the bottom line answer it's kind of like when you're in high school and you're like you got the answer right but you didn't show your work i needed to like i needed to show your work part i knew right i knew the answer but i didn't know why so i just asked it a question and it gave me like i don't know 10 pages of

charts like here's this feature here's this product this one here's the difference between them like and it was very and it's like good that's what i needed that information so i could explain the why so it was very good and then the deep research stuff yeah very very good i mean i've only used a couple times it is it is very good it is very good but so that's chad gbt now there's a couple things i'm gonna need you to tell me about jason one i saw in the ether that uh there was this meta tell all book

I don't know much about it. So if you could, who wrote this book and like, what's it about? Yeah, we'll do the quick version because this is the, the, the most important thing you need to know about this book is that if meta hadn't thrown a fit, you would have never known about

Right. Most people were not going to read this book. And it is now a bestseller because Meta wanted to make it so you could never hear about it. The book's called Careless People. It's written by Sarah Wynn Williams, who's a former director of global policy. And it essentially just details her time working. You know, her job was essentially to make connections between Meta's executives and like heads of state, for example. So the beginning of the book tells the story of they're at like a state dinner somewhere kind of thing. Like and so it is a.

It is a very behind-the-scenes book, and Meta actually filed an arbitration. I was going to say they sued, but they filed an arbitration case to stop her from being able to promote the book because apparently she signed a non-disparagement agreement when she left as part of her severance agreement. And the crazy thing about this is most people would have never paid any attention to this book, except for...

They call it the Streisand effect, right? Where Barbara Streisand, there's pictures of her house on the internet and she threw a fit about it. And so no one was ever going to see the pictures on the internet until she threw a fit about it. And then never once saw the pictures of her house. It's that that's where that comes from. It's the same kind of thing here. This book, I have no idea how much of it is true. The problem for meta is it doesn't matter because it just confirms all the things we think are true, right? That these people have very, very thin skin. I see. And, uh,

are greedy, like are pursuing, pursuing greed at the rabbits or furries. Yeah. Okay. But the consequence of that, the reason that it's so interesting is that the consequence of those things are not good. When you look around the world at the different places, one of the things they talk about is the, the genocide, um, the, the, uh,

um in was it in rwanda uh in the how when facebook went into that country it enabled like the rebels to like it's just there's all of these different things that are just not not great and so uh that's the book it's actually a very good read and though it's funny that the author is like my takeaway from this i did write about it what you wanted meta was to make sure no one ever read it

So you made it so the author couldn't promote it. So now the author is sitting at home cashing checks because it's an international bestseller because of what you did. It's like...

And they totally misunderstood the incentives. Meta's incentive was to refute anything that wasn't true and try to get you to just to disbelieve it. And the author's like, just buy the book and decide for yourself, because if you buy it, I get paid. Right. Like it's like there's such a misalignment of those. And she doesn't have to argue with you about what's true. Right. And so now she's being subpoenaed before Congress to talk about the contents of the book. And anyway, was there anything like you have it? Was there anything like incredibly shocking that you would have learned on

behind the scenes at Meta that didn't expect or I don't know that there was anything shocking because shocking would be like something that you totally did not expect right the book definitely makes Sheryl Sandberg look really bad and Sheryl Sandberg was known you know she came from Google and went to Facebook was the chief operating officer and is largely credited with basically making that a company because

because she was the adult supervision kind of thing. Right, right. Similar to how Eric Schmidt was at Google when he became CEO. Right. And obviously Sheryl Sandberg wasn't the CEO, but her and Mark Zuckerberg worked very closely together. And it just makes her look, you know, her big thing was sort of this, she wrote the feminist work manifesto, lean in kind of thing. And this book makes it seem as though like, no, that's not the real Sheryl Sandberg. She's just like you might've expected from a very opportunistic perspective.

greedy career oriented climb over the top of the dead bodies you leave in your wake kind of a person so that that was a little bit like but again i mean it and i should be clear to say this book is being compared to previous whistleblowers like francis haugen who who who really like uh

blew the whistle on Facebook a couple years ago and released all this stuff about how Facebook was targeting young, especially girls to get them addicted to Instagram. That's like a super brief summary of it. She had receipts. Like she literally had receipts

thousands of documents that probably she shouldn't have had, but as a whistleblower, she got them released into the public. This book doesn't have any receipts, so it's hard to know what in here is, is a fable and what if it's actually true, but it basically all lines up with what you think is probably true. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

It is a good read, though. I recommend it. Here's why you'll like this, Stephen. I don't know why I said that. And now you're going to be either really happy or very offended. But the chapters of this book are all maybe seven to eight pages long. Four to eight pages long. It's written as stories. They're little snippet stories of different things. It's not like reading a narrative that starts on page one and ends on page 300. It's all of these different things. So

Okay. I like that kind of format. Okay. Maybe I will read it. We'll see. Good stuff. Now, one other story I need you to tell me about. I know this was big in the news. Basically, some message was sent by... Why don't you tell me what happened?

And then we can talk about secure messaging apps. Yeah. Okay. So there's two things you should know about this. This is an enormous story, even though probably our audience is like, I don't know. That's like politics. Who cares? Right? That's fine. That's how I feel. So essentially, there's a group of individuals that included the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA Director, and the Director of National Intelligence, among other people. And they had a group chat on Signal.

And I think it's Mike Waltz, who's the national security advisor, added someone to this group chat. And that someone was Jeffrey Goldberg, who's the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. He just got added to this group chat. No one is sure how or why this happened, but he's added to this group chat and he kind of ignores it until they start talking about the...

a bombing that's about to happen in Yemen. Okay. And this happened a couple of weeks ago and he tells this very, he, the headline of his original story was something like the, the,

The secretary of defense texted me war plans for bombing Yemen or something like that. Yeah, exactly. And it's literally what happened. And he thought it had to be fake, but he sat in his, he tells the story that he sat in a parking lot at the supermarket waiting and scrolling on X to see if there would be news, you know, reported about this thing that happened. And when it happened, he's like, this is real.

And so he eventually left it. He waited a couple of weeks and then he published the story. And then the administration was like, no, no, no, no, no. He's lying. There was no classified information. So then he went to the administration and he said, we're going to publish these text messages. Is there anything you'd like redacted? And so they published them. They published that there's one thing that was redacted, which was a message that included a name of somebody, the CIA person that was in there. So anyway, they published them all.

And it's kind of bananas because I wrote an article about this talking about the different types of encryption. And my thing is I don't really know much about what goes into war planning, but I assume that there's already a communications infrastructure for this that's already a solved problem. I think they have this figured out. There are secure telephone and video systems. They have these things called SCIFs.

Do you know what a skiff is? I've heard that name. It's basically a hardened closet that you can go into and no one can listen to or see. It's a secure compartmented information facility. Anyway, they have all these things and these guys are just using Signal on their iPhones to text each other about bombing this terrorist in Yemen. And so then there's a lot of political questions like, I think maybe you shouldn't be doing this. We're going to set that apart.

Well, I just want to say one thing because we're talking about security across different messaging apps. Any security, no matter what a company like Apple builds into it or a signal that promises like the human element is still the weakest link. Yes. Because...

I have a relative who uses iMessage, which is like end-to-end encrypted. Apple had like a whole article about how like it's prepared for quantum computing and with post-quantum computing. And this person does not have a passcode on their iPhone. So it doesn't matter how much encryption is between those blue bubbles. If you could just

press the home button because his button still is. Well, and I think, I think technically if you don't have a passcode on your device, it's not encrypted. Oh, for real? I think that's true. I think because the, the point of putting in the passcode is you're decrypting your device. You,

your device but I feel like the messages are still intent encrypted oh I don't know because I don't think you can turn that yeah we'll have to we'll have to make if anybody has information on that I'd be curious but again like the human element is still the weak link like yes my last my last paragraph was it's worth mentioning however that it does not matter how private or secure an encryption is on a messaging platform if you include someone in a group chat and send a message to the group they're going to be able to read the message

Right? The problem here has nothing to do with encryption, everything to do with human error. Most of these apps offer a secure form of end-to-end encryption for consumers, but there's no guarantee your messages will stay secret if you text them to a journalist. How did this article do? Because this was... Well, I just published it this morning. Oh, you just published it. I'm curious. Yes.

this is amazing so well we'll put link jason's article but basically talking about signal whatsapp and iMessage well and let me say one thing the reason this is a big deal is what if the person who'd been added to this group chat was not the editor-in-chief of the atlantic who is a pretty serious person who waited two weeks before publishing anything did not reveal the contents until the administration was like oh he's either lying or none of this was classified and he said okay well then we're going to

publish them and they didn't ask to have anything redacted, which is actually an interesting thing. You cannot, you like, he can't, you can't, first of all, he's a journalist and you texted the stuff to him.

So he's not obligated to keep it a secret, but he did anyway. Right. Right. And you can't also say none of it was classified and then be mad at him if he publishes it because you just said it wasn't classic. Like, which is it? But anyway, what if that person hadn't been that? What if that person was just a rando who's like, I see an opportunity to sell these secrets to the highest bidder. Let me get on X and find a, you know, Hootie rebel and see what I can do. Like, that's the problem.

They got lucky that the, I mean, it's actually dumb luck that you sent them to a journalist and now that's all public, but also you sent them to someone who apparently is more careful with national secrets than the people in the text message. This is first, I would think, I don't know, again, the internal workings of administrations and politics, but I would think that there would be some kind of proprietary, uh,

communication like text communication like built into whatever like the highest offices of the United States government like I feel like it would not be signal or telegram like it would be White House messenger or something like

- I mean, I think the general thing is this type of stuff's not supposed to be happening on an iPhone, period. This is the stuff that you go into a secure room with a secure video conferencing system and you message all the people. It's like they have their own secure version of Zoom.

Right. Like where they can all it's all encrypted end to end. And not only that, but like the lines are hard. Like it's just a different type of thing. It is not a consumer product that you can download for free on your iPhone. I think. And again, I'm not like I don't care about the like I don't think that anyone questions the mission that they were doing. Right. Like that part of it is not really up for debate necessarily. It's just the.

you would assume that the people in these positions would be tech savvy enough to a know that this is probably a bad idea and be realized when someone has entered the chat and you don't know who they are. That's, I mean, I guess, you know, there's a bunch of people in a chat and again, people ever say everybody's so busy, like just not taking the time to look and like pay attention.

Which is why you don't send the time you're going to drop a bomb in a group chat. Fair. I did just look it up and I remembered correctly that Obama was actually the first president to use a smartphone while in office. He used a BlackBerry. His BlackBerry is famous, yes. The famous BlackBerry, not an iPhone for security reasons. And you know, there were smartphones before that. You could have done all the Palms, the older BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile. Presidents could have used smartphones, but it wasn't until 2008 with Obama. And

And now, of course, you know, Trump has, I assume, an iPhone that he tweets from or whatever. But it's just wild. So you have the article about the messaging services. You got Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage. And you have like pros and cons of each. Yeah. I mean, I also threw in Telegram and Messenger just because people were going to ask. But the idea is like, which ones are the most secure? The reality is probably Signal.

iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal are all pretty equivalent in terms of their security, the encryption. In fact, WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, right? So the encryption there is good. And Apple uses its own proprietary encryption. And its encryption is probably...

more hardened. It is probably stronger. The reason I say probably is the difference is signals is open source and so it can actually be inspected and they can actually look at it and make sure that there aren't any bugs or flaws or anything in there whereas Apple doesn't allow third-party researchers to do that but Apple does say that it is its encryption is designed for post-quantum computing. Right. Meaning if

if you think about why that matters is right now, all of this encryption is strong enough to resist what computers are capable of doing today, because literally what happens is computers just try to guess your key.

And if you use a 128 character key, it's going to take them 7 million years to figure it out. But a quantum computer could do that in maybe 40 seconds. So Apple is building its encryption to resist it. And the reason that, again, the reason that matters is there's no such thing as a quantum computer that can do that at scale today. But what if somebody took your phone...

and just held on to it for the next 15 years until it was possible. Apple is building its encryption today to resist that possibility in the future. So that part of it is, except for the problem with Apple's encryption is as soon as you text somebody on Android, there's no encryption. Zero. Zip, zilch. Well, now I thought there was a recent update where RCS got intent encryption. I don't think if you're sending it to Android that that's true. Is it? I thought I saw...

a, an article and Gruber wrote about it. Uh, I'll have to find it, but I feel like there was an update recently. I can't find anything. Well, then I'll update my article. It says that I think, I don't think it has started yet. I think they have said that they will eventually. Um, but what I will still sit, stand behind my analysis of it, that if you send something in signal, it doesn't, there's no option for encryption, not encryption, whatever. Um,

If you send something in iMessage, there are multiple levels of how that message might be delivered. In the worst case scenarios, it falls back to SMS. So you could think you are sending something that is encrypted. But if you were sending it to an Android device that doesn't support RCS, which is actually a thing that exists in the world, then it would just fall back to an SMS. So I will stand by the fact that it is a little bit more complicated. In the best case scenario, Apple's is the most secure device.

but it also has the worst fail failure option. Right. Which is like nothing. Yeah. Facebook is adding it to mess its messenger app. WhatsApp is also in and encrypted with a signal protocol. The downside to WhatsApp. So the benefit of WhatsApp is it's the best for group messaging. The downside of it is that it looks terrible. Well, whatever the real downside of it is that meta collects the metadata and

No pun intended. So Meta knows who you're messaging. They don't know what the messages are, but they do collect and store different metadata information. It's not entirely clear what they do and they don't collect, but they are able to. Whereas with Signal, it's completely anonymous. You can completely... That's why journalists use Signal because someone can set up a Signal account

account and be completely anonymous you are not required to attach it to any identifying information whereas iMessage is obviously attached to your phone number in your iCloud account WhatsApp is you have to have a phone number attached to it so there you go that's was that the short enough version no that's good that's good yeah we'll put Jason's article and we'll follow up about the RCS intent encryption because uh I'm curious about that all right let's do it let's do I was gonna say lightning round Glenn uh listener of the show suggested we should do a thunderbolt round

Okay. Thunderbolt, you know, there's no more lightning anymore. USB-C round. USB-C round. First of all, Jon Prosser from PageTech supposedly has a first look at the iOS 19 redesign, which if you watch his video, there's like a few frames basically where he shows what the updated interface might look like, including the kind of glassy circles from Apple Vision Pro, some of the like frosted overlays, which is

And he says this in the video. If you go to like the Apple Sports app today and you click the little top right menu or the Apple Invites app that was recently announced and you'll see kind of these even rounded, more rounded corner type overlays in a Jon Prosser's video, which I'll link below. You know, it's VisionOS-esque and it's the glassy frosted glass or whatever look.

I don't know if that feels like a major redesign. I mean, it is a redesign of sorts. And he says at the end of his video that the icons, which many people were thinking on the iPhone and iPad might go to full on circles like they are on Vision OS. And he says the end of his video, like, no, the icon shape is staying the same.

And then more context, Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg, again, pretty notable leaker. He said, like, nah, all these things that you're seeing right now about iOS 19, like, they're not representative of the actual redesign. So Gurman was saying, like, actually, no, there is a redesign, but it's not what you've been seeing everywhere. So who knows? We'll know in a couple months, but...

Well, what's your over-under? You think we'll have circle icons on the iPhone? No, but I do want to nitpick one thing, just to be clear. Mark Gurman is not a leaker. Mark Gurman is a journalist who has very good sources, many of whom are leakers. There is a distinction there, right? Mark Gurman doesn't have firsthand information about any of this that he is leaking. He is just reporting on what people, for whatever reason, think that they should be telling him. Just to be clear. I wanted to ask you this because I didn't talk about this earlier.

when we mentioned the whole Siri shakeup with John, Jan, and Drea. But Mark Gurman appears to have had either a transcript or a recording of the internal meeting with the Siri team at Apple where they talked about things aren't going so well.

So to have a transcript or recording of that meeting means someone inside Apple recorded it and sent it to German and no one else, like no one else has this information. A German is singular in that he reports on this stuff and no one else has firsthand contacts and information.

It also appears that Gurman has multiple people inside. Like I imagine to have as much information as he does, he would have to have people on the hardware side and the software side, because even within Apple, a lot of the time those teams don't communicate, you know, because of secrecy and things like that. So to have multiple people inside Apple feeding information to,

Also, even recordings and or transcripts of internal meetings, which seems, at least to me, very risky as if I was an employee of Apple and wanted to keep my job.

In your opinion, as a journalist, why would someone do that? Why is someone giving Mark Gurman this information? If they're a personal friend, I get it. To have that many personal friends inside seems like unlikely. But like, what is the motivation of the people inside Apple who are working on this stuff, who I would think want to make a great thing and then show it to the world at the event, the Apple event?

But why are they sending this stuff to government? Well, I mean, there's usually a couple of reasons why that could happen. One, sometimes people will leak information because they think that something is bad or

Right.

I also think that there are just people who are like, German's the most well-known one. And I kind of want to have a little bit of juice with German. And so I'm going to just send, send this stuff. I think that is sometimes as simple as the human need to be like, I know a thing and now I'm cool because I give you a thing and then I get to see it in writing. Like, I feel like that's probably part of it. The other option is that German and Tim Cook just have breakfast every other day. And he's like, I need this out there.

I don't know. Cause you said he might have multiple sources. I'm like, or he just has one, one very well placed source. No, that's not what's happening. I promise. It's just, it's weird. I'm just curious the motivation of these people inside Apple, uh, wanting to give, because even if you get juice with Mark Gurman for what, when you leave Apple, is he going to hire you on the technology team for Bloomberg? I don't think so there. I mean, but there is a, you know, that this is true. Like, uh,

There's something about I know a thing no one else knows, and it's going to just feel so good to tell somebody who could tell everybody. I don't know. I guess. I mean, I don't know. It seems weird, but... I agree. I think it... I mean, I have had people reach out to me with stuff. So here's the other thing for Gurman. I've had people who have reached out to me, not nearly on this scale and not nearly as exciting, just random things.

But if I can't find some way of confirming that, I can't even like, there's nothing that's useless to me. So if a random person just emails me like, did you know that Tim Cook's about to retire? Like that's a stock market moving event. You can't just publish that, right? You can't.

Yeah. So you have to have some kind of confirmation. The same thing would have to be true. So when you have a recording of a meeting, as long as you're, is he can confirm that those voices you hear are actually the voices that they are purported to be. That's pretty good confirmation. Right. Wild. Here's if he did it with a voice memo on the iPhone, was he wearing an AI? A wire. Somebody's wearing a wire. It's strange. Well, I'm curious if Apple talks about it internally and be like, do you find the mole?

I mean, there are people who have this, like Alex Heath has the same kind of connection at Meta, right? He has so many, he has published multiple all hands meetings from Meta and, and, you know, Casey Newton, the same kind of thing has the same Chris Welch with Sonos. He's a person. Yes. I think he's actually potentially on staff at Sonos. I'm just kidding. I'm not saying that to, to bad mouth him at all. I'm just saying he is very well placed there. You know, Tom Warren at Microsoft, those kinds of things. There are plenty of, they all work at the verge, basically just the verge.

And German, Heblumberg. And German, yep. All right, this Thunderbolt round, it was not fast. But, okay. I'm sorry. No, no, my fault. We'll jam through these. Supposedly one of the rumors of the iPhone 17 is that we'll finally get to 8K video, which we've had 4K video for, I think, since like the iPhone 6S. It's been a long time. So maybe 8K video. Yeah, this is the lossless audio of the cameras on the iPhone. Yeah.

But if you have 8K video with two lenses, then maybe you could do 4K spatial video for Apple Vision Pro. You know what I'm saying? Sure. But those, yeah, maybe. We'll see. I don't know. I think I'm surprised this isn't what you said. The biggest benefit of 8K video is that you can shoot it and then you can like crop it in. Crop it in. Yeah, yeah. That's a huge, huge benefit for sure.

And also Apple watch. You send this to me as well, that this is from Bloomberg. So German, that then Apple might be working at AI features in the Apple watch utilizing cameras, which you have said in the past to your credit, put a camera in the thing. Well, I have said in the past that the Apple watch is the ideal AI device, right? Put a camera in it or not. I just want credit for having said when those stupid humane AI pins and that stupid, uh,

R1, whatever you put on your desk, that orange thing, that thing. Yep. When those things came out, I'm like, no, no one wants to wear that or carry it around. You're already wearing the ideal outfit.

ai device right this i mean it's not a joke when i say that i turn off the listening to siri on every device except for my watch because it's the only one i ever want to respond to anything right like it's just so yeah i get it all right and finally for the thunderbolt round delete your 23andme data if you haven't yet 23andme went bankrupt they're being bought out and i actually did 23andme a number of years ago for me and one

one of my kids and my wife for various reasons. And I was like, okay, I'm going to delete my stuff. So you can go in and like download your information and like PDF format, which I did. And then I told him to hopefully delete everything. But yeah, that's one of the, one of the things about some of these startups and DNA and information like that. But yeah, no, I've never done that. There was, there was a great, um,

I think it must have been on threads from Joanna Stern. She's like the things that we've learned this week, like don't text war plans to journalists. Uh,

don't give your DNA information to a company that is one, you know, bad quarter away from a yard sale, like, like all of these things, like yard sale with your DNA. Exactly. Because I mean, uh, they're, you know, they're going to sell off all of the assets in one of those assets is a huge database full of all of this DNA information. And you can just imagine how appealing that's going to be to XAI or open AI or one of those companies. Yeah.

And I think that the current CEO, um,

What would you key? What is her first name? And I think it's her first name wants to buy it. And in fact, she offered to buy it, but this is a company that at one point was worth two or $3 billion and is now worth something like 25 million, like bad deal. That's wild. Okay. So we have a little time. That was the Thunderbolt round. And so for our personal tech, this is a hundred percent inspired by the accidental tech podcast. If you subscribe to their show and support them, they had a bonus episode recently about their websites. Okay.

I've not listened yet. You haven't listened to it yet? Not that one. There is a moment where John Syracuse says a bunch of words in a row. And he says in this bonus episode how his work was basically as a web developer for many years. Like that was his life. And it's about at the hour mark, if you listen to that episode of ATP, it's the bonus episode. But he like rattles off a bunch of words.

And it was like when you see in movies or shows when like a superhero who's in there like plain clothes does something that might give away that they're a superhero. Like Clark Kent runs a little too fast or like throws a bowling ball a little too hard. It was like one of those moments where like Syracuse just broke for a second. It's like, wait a minute.

this guy he's a superhero and it just i listened to it like several times i was like it was just amazing because i was actually listening at like one and a half speed which i don't normally do but i had a lot of episodes to get through and at one and a half speed it was like almost unintelligible and i was like oh wait i need to go back and it was it was funny it was almost unintelligible that's funny for me anyway but i thought it'd be interesting to talk about our website journey

you know, you have a website, a personal website, aside from where you write it, Inc. I have a personal website. And so eventually want to get to like, what are they on now, which is probably not as exciting. But I was curious if you could recall back to like your first or oldest websites for yourself. And what did they, at least what did you build them on? Or what might have, like, what kind of content did you post? And I'll give you some time to think about it because I'll share a couple of things. I think the first time I ever had a website was

It was iWeb because I was a .Mac subscriber. I paid for .Mac, which was like $100 a year. That's where I got my first Apple email address, which is still my Apple ID today. And I just searched. And for some reason, Apple still has an iWeb page on their website with a video. This video is just living here, showing you how to use iWeb.

I did not expect this to exist and I'm so happy it does. And now it is documented forever because it's in this episode. But I think I web was probably the first time because it, I web was an application on the Mac. And if you paid for a dot Mac account, they would basically let you build a website and I web the app hit publish, and it would be publicly available. Like you, you couldn't really connect like third party domains. And it wasn't like a full on hosted website where you had an FTP access or whatever.

But it was pretty cool. Like you could build your own website, publish it from your Mac, and it was on the internet, at least on your .Mac or whatever. So I think Iowa was probably my very first one. I can't remember exactly what I put on it, but that was the first. And then for many years after that, basically end of college and in my first full-time job, I remember my very first job interview.

I was just personally starting to learn about web and how to make a website. And in the interview, I was asked, hey, can you make us a website in addition to all these other things that you're going to do? And I was like, yeah, no problem. And at that moment, I had never published a website personally besides my iWeb. But I was confident I was pretty close to being able to do it. And so I could do it.

And so those early years of me figuring it out, I'm going to show that I'm not showing this for anyone to like sign up or look this up. But I remember I bought a hosting account, shared hosting on website source.

which I didn't even know what it was, website source. And I didn't really know what to do with it or how to use it. It really took me a while to figure out like, what do I do with this? And I remember I used the app, which is still around. It's still a good app, Cyberduck, which was a free app for FTP access to upload files. But that was my first web hosting. And then for many years, I built websites using this application, which is still available, but you

which you can still use today. And I'm sure it's probably really good right now, but rapid Weaver and rapid Weaver was like the Mac users simplified dream Weaver. I mean, it was nothing like dream Weaver, but obviously the name was meant to evoke dream Weaver as the, as an idea. But I used rapid Weaver for many years to build many websites. I eventually started making websites for like other people and they would pay me to do it. And I loved rapid Weaver.

And basically RapidWeaver was you design it on your Mac in this application, this native application. It felt like other Mac apps. It was familiar. And then you would publish it. You can hit publish and it would send it to whatever your hosting provider is. I remember it took me weeks to figure out what directory in the web host I was supposed to be publishing to. So this website was actually live on the Internet.

What is a domain and how do I connect it to the web host? Like it was a complicated world back when I was doing it, but I did it. I built many websites on that and I had a personal website where I did start blogging and things like that. And it was really fun. After RapidWeaver, so many other services came out where you

This whole process just made it easier. WordPress obviously being the most, the forefront. I had tried WordPress, I think briefly and just wasn't about it. I just, I wasn't crazy about the backend UI. I didn't like the idea of constantly having to update plugins or whatever. And so I think after my RapidWeaver days, pretty shortly after I found Squarespace. And I mean, this was before they like advertised literally everywhere. This was before their Superbowl ad. I think I probably heard them from like

back to work with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin for the first time. And once I started creating Squarespace websites, like it was over, like I was off to the races. I was like, this is everything I needed to. I'm totally good. I need nothing else. And if you go to my personal website today, which is beard.fm.

It is built on Squarespace. And I actually have some of my earliest videos on my YouTube channel is about Squarespace because you can do a lot with it. Like you can host a podcast on Squarespace and you can do a blog. You can even now do online courses and membership areas and all kinds of stuff. And I really love Squarespace for how easy it is. And I never have to think about it. And that's really the goal, because I don't update my website a lot.

But when I do post something, I want to just not have to think about it. I'm happy enough with the design. Look, primary technology is right here on the homepage. The latest episode, boom, right there. And so Squarespace was the answer and is still the answer for me today. And I really like it. So I've built so many Squarespace websites. I'm trying to find this...

I'll try to find it and then I'll show it after you. But I am on Squarespace's website as a Squarespace expert. They like gave me that little title, I guess, because I have so many Squarespace websites behind the scenes. Yeah. So I'm proud of that. But anyway, I don't know. What can you tell us, Jason, of your website?

website history and or whatever you want to say about it well i mean i'm just going to start by saying that i am a member of their circle gold because i have built so many websites okay so you're saying there lots and lots and lots but uh okay i there's no there's a zero percent chance i'm going to be able to get the chronology of this no no because i know i've used iweb and i've built plenty of several websites on iweb

But I can't, couldn't even tell you what the deal is anymore. But the first, that was not the first time. I've used, I used Microsoft Office Front Page, which was an HTML editor, like late 90s-ish, right? And it was literally editing HTML and same kind of thing, figuring out where you put these, this folder of files to put somewhere, that kind of thing. I will, I was going back and I know that one of my first blogs was on TypePad and it still exists today.

It's still there. It's still there. Very exciting because I was running a photography business and if you're a photographer, you have to have somewhere to publish your work. And it's like...

kind of a mind trip here to be like, you get to see all this old stuff. Um, there is, I then had, I did at one point, I don't know if it was before or after that. So I can't tell you, but I had a blog, well, I'm blogger. Oh yeah. And that one apparently redirects to what would have at one point been a Squarespace site that I do not think exists anymore. But I ran a, you know, I ran a photography business for a long time and so had multiple websites for the, yeah, that, that, uh, domain is dead. So, okay. Um,

That's the thing. It's like, I don't even know, but I'm actually surprised that this type pad thing still just exists. I actually am surprised type pad that that URL still resolves. Like that. It's even still just a friend. Like I'm actually shocked that all of this stuff is still that's anyway. Um, but I eventually settled on Squarespace and that's where like my

My current website right now, I don't pay any attention to. Essentially, if you just go to my jasonayton.net, it's just essentially a landing page. And it'll be like, go here to read my articles, go here to sign up for my newsletter. There's like old blog posts that you can get to, my bio, that kind of thing. I just needed to have something out there to have a landing page kind of thing. And it's where I think most people find my...

email address when they want to contact me and that's fine. That's great. So, uh, but I, I have struggled for a long time because I have a newsletter that's on sub sack, uh,

should I just be publishing those things for on my own? Cause Squarespace could handle all that. I could just write them as blog posts, kind of do the strategy model, like what Ben Thompson does where you publish them as a blog post and then you email them to people. Right. I haven't had time to figure all that out because most of the time, if I'm writing something, it's going on ink, right? Like there, but there are a lot of things I'd love to write about that aren't suitable for that. And so I, I wrestled with that a lot, but I just have not had time to figure it out. Eventually I will have more of a website, something, um,

My old photography websites still technically exist even though many of the domains don't because you can just find them at Squarespace, right? Like there's still, so in order to see them, there's, which actually is, I love that this is true because there are some of my old, like I'm a writer. So finding your old blog posts, like there's the most recent one I wrote on one of them was about our daughter, our oldest daughter when she was in kindergarten and

And I get a hysterical phone call. This is the first week of school. It's like the third day of school. And my wife, I was at the grocery store. My wife was like, she didn't get off the bus.

And I'm like, that's like the worst thing you can possibly hear in my wife's hysterical. So I, we had this really old minivan and I'm driving that minivan faster than you could ever drive. This, this should not have been driven this fast to find the bus. And eventually the bus circles back around and she gets, her explanation was just, I forgot to get off the bus. Like I'm new to this. I'm a kindergartner. I've only been doing this for three days. I just, I was looking at all the pretty houses and I forgot to get off the bus. I forgot to get off the bus.

And I'm so glad that I have these things. You know what I mean? Like that still exists. So thanks for taking me down this memory lane. No, it's good. I actually, uh,

Oh, just one more thing. Sorry. Most of the websites I work on today are WordPress, just to be clear. Like, I mean, I don't have word. I'm not using one for anything personal, but ink uses where everybody uses WordPress. So I'm very, very familiar with WordPress. Yeah. It's just more than what most people need when they're doing something. Yeah. And so I'm going to show this page. This is my, my,

my Squarespace expert page. Whoa. This was, Squarespace partnered with 99designs a few years ago and you could basically like

have people just reach like find you on the 99 designs page and because I had already made like a hundred plus Squarespace websites previously they automatically put me on there and so these were just the projects I completed through 99 designs for like a year and it was honestly so overwhelming like this could have been my full-time job but then I realized I

I couldn't stand making websites for people because they all have like infinite changes. Oh, I actually don't want to do this at all. So, but I was able to make websites really fast and people like them for the most part, but this is, this is my, my expert page. But I will say there was a point I'll put our websites in the show notes as well.

I did do this one like blogging experiment. I use Squarespace. I called it people think, and I wanted to blog every day for a year, just a short, like three paragraph blogs or whatever. And I did it and it's, it's hidden somewhere on my main website, but I was proud of that. You know, writing every day for a year, even just a little bit, there was like one day I forgot, like I missed it and it went past midnight. And so I wrote about failure because that's, that's a lesson too. Um,

Uh, but I did, I wrote 365 blog posts and that was, that was pretty fun. But yeah, it's our personal websites. I will say I looked into ghost recently because I know a lot of people look at ghost as a blogging newsletter platform and like paid membership type features. It looks like an awesome platform. There's no import from Squarespace feature and to rebuild some of the pages that I have on my website, which is,

Like one of the pages on my website is every smart home device I have ever bought and reviewed. And like this page is huge. I have like anchor links where you can like jump to different categories of the things. And Squarespace has a cool feature where if you're an Amazon affiliate, you give it your Amazon ID and then there's just a block you can add and search for an Amazon product and it'll automatically make it your affiliate link.

So like I have this huge page and like this page alone to recreate in something like ghost. I saw no way to do that easily or quickly. And I was like, nah, forget it.

Forget it. Not doing it. I should say that we are actually, you can, I mean, we've just talked a lot about Squarespace and it's because we both use it. We are actually the only podcast in America that's not sponsored by Squarespace. So we actually mean it. I just want to be clear. It is true. That said, if you're listening from Squarespace and you'd like to sponsor an episode, we would love to talk to you. This would have been the sponsor. We'll talk about you again. We'll talk about you for a month. I mean, that's my website. I mean, I can scroll through my Squarespace account and you can see how many times.

same and also like honestly personally it is one of my things like i would love to have at least one squarespace sponsorship even just for a single episode because i've heard it on so many other podcasts it's just validation it's just validation i just wanted it and just for some reason they have never sponsored any podcast i have done they didn't do apple insider they haven't done this one but anyway maybe one day maybe one day all right all

All right, I want you to talk about the Sigma BF. We're going to do that for our bonus episode. So no one got ads today because we didn't have a sponsor. But thank you for those of you who support the show through Memberful or Apple Podcasts because you supported this episode 100%. And if you support the show, you get the bonus episode. Jason has the Sigma BF camera, which I'm very excited to hear about. And so if you want to hear that bonus episode and our entire back catalog of bonus episodes, you can support the show at primarytech.fm. Click bonus episodes or do it directly on Apple Podcasts.

I would say do it through primarytech.fm because then you get the chapters. I post it there first or whatever. It's just because Apple Podcasts is limited. Anyway, we love your support. We love your five-star rating and reviewing Apple Podcasts. Help us get back up to a five-star rating. And we'd love to have you in the community, social.primarytech.fm to join the discussions on the episodes and hundreds, literally over 200 people are there who listen to this show and it's awesome to have them there. So thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We're going to go record a bonus episode. See you next week.